Reporting

Does CSLA .NET support report generation?

Business objects created using CSLA .NET are bindable, and therefore can sometimes be used directly from report generation tools.

However, I generally divide "reports" into two categories:

. "Lists", which are generated using small amounts of input, and may result in small or large amounts of output

. "Reports", which are generated using large amounts of input, and may result in small or large amounts of output

Lists can be generated from business objects or other in-memory data, or from data in a database. Since the amount of data required to generate the list is small it doesn't matter a lot where the data comes from.

Reports can only be generated directly from the database by using a report generation tool. The overhead of retrieving large amounts of data into objects and then generating the report is simply unworkable.

Most people, in my observation, treat everything like a report. If they have lists, they'll often generate the output using Word or Excel exports.